History will record the early 21st century as the era of the Great Betrayal. We witness a profound moral collapse within Western academia, media and political movements a collapse defined by a deafening silence regarding the systematic butchery of the Iranian people by the Islamic Republic, contrasted against the ever-present, mobilized rage against the State of Israels war in Gaza. This disparity is not an accident of geography or a result of ignorance. It is a calculated, ideological alignment. The Western Left comprising Marxists, post-modernists and self-described progressives has abandoned the Enlightenment principles of liberty, secularism and universal human rights in favor of a Red-Green with Islamic totalitarianism.
We must confront the brutal truth: The Lefts obsession with Israel can be seen as a cover for deep-seated antisemitism and a hatred of Western civilization. The Left has been supporting movements that are increasingly anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist. The Iranian people, who yearn for a secular, pro-Western democracy, support a movement that does not align with the modern Left.
The Left perceives the Islamic Republic not as a theocratic tyranny, but as a victim of American imperialism. Consequently, they view the Iranian peoples struggle for freedom not as a liberation movement, but as a color revolution instigated by Western intelligence.
The anatomy of silence
When Israel launched its counteroffensive in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas, the Western Left mobilized instantly. Organizations such as , the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Palestine Action the streets of London, New York and Paris. In London alone, organizers over 35 major marches within months, drawing hundreds of thousands of participants to chant for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Contrast this with the reaction to the Iranian uprisings. In November 2019, the Islamic Republic 1,500 protesters within days. In 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini, security forces over 500 civilians and blinded hundreds more with birdshot. In the most recent 20252026 uprisings, the regimes violence escalated to terminal phase levels, thousands in a desperate bid to survive.
The lack of outcry from the Left exposes its double standard. The Left cares only about the identity of the perpetrator and the identity of the victim. If the perpetrator is a Western ally (Israel), the outrage is infinite. If the perpetrator is an enemy of the West (Iran), the silence is absolute.
Where were the encampments at Columbia University for the boys and girls shot in the eyes by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? Where were the rallies in London for the Baluchis massacred in Zahedan? They did not exist. The Left remained in their coffee shops, their faculty lounges and their union halls, silent.
| Metric | Gaza War Response (Leftist Mobilization) | Iranian Uprisings Response (Leftist Mobilization) |
| Major Protests (London) | 35+ major marches (Oct 20232025) | Sporadic, small gatherings ( 餃勳硃莽梯棗娶硃)泭 |
| Campus Encampments | across the US/Europe (Columbia, UCLA) | Non-existent; Campus groups ignored Iranian students |
| Organizational Statements | Daily press , Genocide accusations (DSA, CodePink) | Anti-war statements warning against US/Israel intervention |
| Key Slogans | Global Intifada, From the River to the Sea | Silence; of Woman, Life, Freedom” |
| Target of Ire | The Victim of Aggression (Israel/West) | The Liberator (Protesters/Israel/US) |
Table 1: The Asymmetry of Outrage
The Left justifies its obsession with Gaza by citing casualty numbers provided by Hamas a designated terrorist organization while ignoring the verified slaughter in Iran. This reflects a deliberate epistemology of ignorance. When a terrorist regime like Hamas reports numbers, the Left treats them as gospel to fuel anti-Israel sentiment. When the Islamic Republic slaughters its citizens, the Left does not put the blame on the Iranian regime. Instead, it claims that there is a Western behind the regimes crimes that is, that the crimes are a direct of US imperialism.
In Iran, during the crackdown of January 2026 alone, credible estimates place the death toll in the thousands within a single week. Amnesty International this as an unprecedented deadly crackdown involving unlawful force, firearms and machine guns utilized against unarmed crowds. Statistical analysis the daily kill rate in Irans crackdowns exceeds the deadliest days of the Gaza war and even the IranIraq war.
Yet, the Left accepts Hamass numbers without question. They ignore the reality that Hamas combatants in civilian areas, using their own population as human shields. They ignore the warnings Israel provides. Conversely, regarding Iran, they question the numbers. They for independent verification in a country that bans all independent media. They prioritize the sovereignty of the butcher over the life of the victim.
Judith Butler who can be considered a high priest of Leftist theory the concept of grievability, or the idea that power structures determine whose lives count as human. In a twist of supreme irony, Butler and their acolytes enforce the very hierarchy they claim to critique. To the modern Left, a Palestinian life lost in a war started by Hamas constitutes a cosmic tragedy, a genocide demanding global revolution. An Iranian life by the Islamic Republic constitutes an inconvenience, a complication in the struggle against American hegemony.
Butler might have condemned Hamass violence after October 7, but they also spent decades Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive social movements and part of the global Left. This theoretical framework grants moral immunity to Islamist butchers. By Iran and its proxies as resistance, the Left strips their victims Iranian women, dissidents, Jews of grievability. The Left does not mourn Iranians because the Left views the Iranian regime as an ally in the war against the West.
This hierarchy is explicitly racial and ideological. The Left perceives Palestinians as brown victims of white Zionism. They also perceive Iranians as brown, but because the Iranian regime opposes the West, the Left cannot conceptualize the Iranian people as victims of that regime. To do so would require admitting that an anti-Western force can be evil. This disrupts their binary worldview. Therefore, they erase the Iranian victim.
The Red-Green alliance
To understand why a Marxist student in New York cheers for a theocratic mullah in Tehran, we must dissect the Red-Green Alliance. This is not a temporary marriage of convenience; it is a deep ideological fusion of Marxism (Red) and Islamism (Green) united by a shared hatred of Western liberalism, capitalism and Zionism.
The betrayal began in 1979. Michel Foucault, the godfather of post-modernism, traveled to Iran and famously the Islamic Revolution. He saw in Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeinis movement a political spirituality that offered a potent weapon against the hegemony of Western liberal modernity. Foucault explicitly the warnings of Iranian feminists and secularists, dismissing their fears of theocracy as Western anxieties.
Foucaults endorsement established a precedent that plagues the Left to this day. Foucault human rights as a Western construct. Therefore, the Islamist rejection of these rights became a form of liberation from Western discourse. According to him, the Islamic Republics brutality was not barbarism, but an to the sterile rationality of the West. Any crime committed by an anti-imperialist force is forgivable. Foucault the execution of homosexuals and leftists by the revolutionaries because the revolution challenged the Shah, an American ally.
Today, we see Foucaults intellectual DNA in the works of Hamid Dabashi and the editorials of The Guardian. When Dabashi that Israeli Mossad agents instigate Iranian protests to distract from Gaza, he channels Foucaults refusal to grant agency to the Iranian people. To these theorists, Iranians cannot possibly desire Western-style freedom; they must be puppets of a foreign plot.
Classical Marxism views religion as the opium of the masses. However, the New Left, realizing the working class in the West had rejected revolution, sought a new proletariat. They it in the Global South and specifically in Islamist movements.
This convergence rests on three pillars:
Shared Enemy: Both identify the United States and Israel (the and Little Satan, respectively) as the primary obstacles to their utopia.
Shared Method: Both advocate for the violent overthrow of existing structures. The Left Islamist terrorism as armed struggle or resistance.
Shared Antisemitism: Marx identified capitalism with Judaism (in ). Islamists identify Judaism with cosmic evil. The Red-Green alliance creates a seamless fusion where anti-Zionism as the socially acceptable vehicle for this shared hatred.
The Lefts silence on Iran is a direct requirement of this alliance. You do not criticize your comrades in the trenches. If Hamas and Hezbollah are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle, as Butler suggested, then the patron of these groups the Iranian regime must remain protected from criticism.
Postmodernism dismantled the concept of objective truth, replacing it with narratives and power dynamics. In this worldview, there are no facts, only colonial or decolonial perspectives. The Iranian regime murders women for showing hair, whereas the postmodern interpretation that criticizing the hijab law is Islamophobic and imposes Western feminist standards on a unique culture.
This intellectual acrobatics the Left to march for reproductive justice in America while supporting a regime that rapes female prisoners as policy. They view the Iranian protester demanding secularism not as a hero, but as a corrupted by Western ideology. This is why the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom few takers among the Western radical Left; it is too universal, too liberal and too aligned with Western values.
The genocide libel and the antisemitic core
The Lefts hypocrisy crystallizes in its application of the term genocide. The Left accuses the Jewish state of the very crimes the Iranian regime commits daily, yet the Left remains silent on the latter. If they are as concerned about human rights as they claim, then they would not be so silent about the crimes being committed in Iran. The disproportionate outrage at Israel over the Iranian regime leads me to believe that antisemitism, more than a genuine concern for human rights, is the motivator.
Let us compare the conduct of the war in Gaza with the repression in Iran.
Intent: Israel targets Hamas combatants in civilian areas. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) provides warnings, corridors and aid. The casualty ratios, even accepting Hamas figures, fall well the norms of urban warfare. Of course, this does not mean that every action taken by the IDF is beyond criticism, nor that all have been flawless.
Irans Intent: The Iranian regime targets its own civilians women, students, shopkeepers with lethal intent to preserve power. They use machine guns on crowds, execute prisoners without trial and deliberately blind protesters.
The Left Israels defensive war a genocide but refuses to apply even the term massacre to Irans actions. When the United States or Israel threatens to intervene to stop the killing in Iran, the Left them as imperialist, opposing external intervention even amid reports of repression. They mobilize to protect the regime from consequences, effectively ensuring the slaughter continues.
Antisemitism as the organizing principle
Why this disparity? The answer in the identity of the perceived imperialist. The Left Jews as white, wealthy and powerful the ultimate oppressors in the intersectional hierarchy. Israel, as the collective Jew, represents the success of a distinct nation-state and Western values in the Middle East.
Conversely, the Left views Muslims as the ultimate victims. Therefore, a Muslim regime killing its own people causes cognitive dissonance in the Leftist mind. It disrupts the narrative of White/Jewish Oppressor vs. Brown/Muslim Victim. To resolve this, the Left the crime (Iran) or blames it on Western sanctions.
But when Jews fight back against Islamist aggression? That confirms the Lefts worldview. The charge of genocide becomes central to that framing. Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isnt inherently antisemitic. However, when it is deployed selectively, detached from legal standards, and used to equate Jews with Nazis, it functions less as legal analysis and more as moral inversion the West seems to prove that the Left does not care about dead Muslims; they only care about dead Muslims if they can blame Jews for the deaths.
The Red-Green alliance uses anti-Zionism to mask its antisemitism. However, the mask slips when we observe their reaction to the Iranian opposition. The Iranian people who I consider the bravest freedom fighters in the world overwhelmingly support Israel. They Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran. They Israeli flags and thank Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his support.
The Left hates this. They hate that the noble savage (in their eyes) refuses to play the role of the anti-Zionist victim. Because the Iranian people support Israel, the Left them as tainted or puppets. This reveals the terrifying truth: The Left would rather see Iranians die under the Mullahs than live free in a pro-Western, pro-Israel democracy.
The 2026 crisis and Western complicity
The uprising of 20252026 in Iran marked the terminal phase of the Islamic Republic. The regime, bankrupt and devoid of legitimacy, unleashed hell upon its population. The Western Lefts response constituted an act of complicity that history will judge as severely as the Stalinist apologia of the 1930s.
By early 2026, the Iranian economy collapsed. The Rial lost all value, severing the social contract between the state and the Bazaaris. The regime became a Zombie State, existing only to kill.Protests spread to all 31 provinces, not reform, but the end of the Islamic Republic.The regime responded with a victory doctrine of its own: total annihilation of dissent. They cut the internet, deployed heavy weaponry in Kurdish and Balochi areas, and began mass executions.
While Iranians died in the streets, the Western Left mobilized against them.
Outlets like and pushed conspiracy theories that the protests were Israel-instigated revolts involving Mossad agents hiding in crowds. This narrative serves to dehumanize the protesters, painting them as foreign agents worthy of death.
Groups like CodePink that the unrest resulted solely from US sanctions, absolving the regime of its corruption and mismanagement. They demanded the lifting of sanctions, which would only fund the regimes repression machine.
and other anti-war groups organized titled No War On Iran, explicitly aiming to prevent Western support for the uprising. By lobbying against pressure on Tehran, these groups acted as the unpaid lobbyists of the Ayatollahs.
The Iranian people have moved beyond the Reformist vs. Hardliner game. They chant, Reformist, Hardliner, the game is over. Yet, the Western Left and the Biden-era diplomatic establishment clung to the Reformist hope, backing figures like Masoud Pezeshkian even as he presided over massacres.
The Left refuses to accept that the Islamic Republic cannot be reformed. To admit this would require admitting that a religious, anti-Western state is inherently evil. The Left prefers the stability of a totalitarian Islamist regime over the chaos of a pro-Western revolution. This is the racism of low expectations: They believe Iranians are incapable of democracy and destined for theocracy.
Israel and the Iranian people
In the darkness of the Lefts betrayal, one nation stood firmly with the Iranian people: Israel. This alliance, forged in shared existential struggle, exposes the Lefts antisemitism and anti-Westernism in stark relief.
Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly, , We identify with the struggle of the Iranian people … a free Iran is no dream. Israel did not just offer words; it degraded the regimes suppression apparatus. The 12-Day War of June 2025 and Israeli strikes on IRGC command centers weakened the regimes iron grip, the space for the uprising. Israeli intelligence penetration and precision airstrikes decimated Hezbollahs senior command structure in 2024, stripping Tehran of its primary retaliatory lever and the regime strategically orphaned. Furthermore, the Israeli Air Force used F-35I Adir stealth fighters to dismantle the S-300 and Bavar-373 air defense networks, that the regime can no longer protect its own airspace or its nuclear infrastructure in Fordow and Natanz.
Contrast this with the leaders of the Western Left:
Jeremy Corbyn: While quick to for a ceasefire to save Hamas, Corbyn offered only tepid, both sides rhetoric on Iran. He historically appeared on Iranian state TV (Press TV) and payments of up to 瞿10,000 (~$13,800) from the regimes propaganda arm.
The Squad (US Congress): Representatives who weep for Gaza largely silent or blamed US imperialism for the unrest in Iran. These members consistently vote against sanctions that would target the IRGCs financial lifelines while simultaneously advocating for the delisting of groups that serve as Tehrans regional proxies.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement its strongest external support in Israel. Tel Aviv City Hall lit up with the movements slogan. Israeli civil society the #IsraelisloveIranians campaign.
The Lefts reaction to this solidarity was repulsion. Anti-Zionist activists Israel of purple washing or co-opting the Iranian struggle. They argued that Iranian women could not possibly want support from the Zionist entity. This proves that for the Left, hatred of Israel supersedes the rights of women. They would rather Iranian women struggle alone and die than accept help from the Jewish state.
Conservative modernism and regime change
The time for containment and appeasement has passed. The Reformist illusion is dead. The Lefts worldview has collapsed into a morass of antisemitic conspiracy theories and apology for tyranny. We must look to a new path: conservative modernism and decisive intervention.
The solution to the Middle Easts chaos is not the Lefts secular totalitarianism nor the Islamists theocratic totalitarianism. It is conservative modernism. This philosophy combines:
Economic Liberalism: Smashing the state-controlled bonyads and cronyism of the Mullahs to empower the individual.
Cultural Conservatism: Respecting tradition while rejecting theocracy; building institutions on family and property rather than martyrdom.
Institutional Reform: Creating a secular state that protects rights through law, not religious fiat.
This vision aligns with the aspirations of the Iranian people, who desire a normal, prosperous nation-state, not a revolutionary cause.
The Left screams that intervention causes chaos. We argue that the regimes existence causes chaos. A smart intervention strategy is the moral and strategic imperative: The US must provide direct-to-cell satellite internet (Starlink) to break the regimes digital blockade, allowing the revolution to organize. Israel and the West must decapitate the IRGC leadership and destroy the repression machine (Basij centers, logistics), tipping the balance of power to the street. The West must recognize a transitional council led by figures like Reza Pahlavi, who commands the loyalty of the silent majority and can facilitate military defections.
The fall of the Islamic Republic will shatter the Red-Green alliance. Without Tehrans oil money and ideological backing, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will wither. The Western Left will lose its primary anti-imperialist hero.
The evidence is damning. The Western Left has become the useful idiot of Islamic fascism. They march for Gaza because they hate Israel. They ignore Iran because they hate the West. They smear the Iranian opposition because they hate freedom.
Their hypocrisy is not accidental; it is foundational. By aligning with one of the most reactionary, misogynistic and homicidal regimes on the planet, the Left has forfeited its moral authority. They are not champions of the oppressed; they are the public relations wing of the oppressor.
We must reject their anti-war slogans, which are nothing more than pro-regime demands. We must stand unequivocally with the people of Iran and the State of Israel. The game is over. The Reformists are dead. The Left is exposed. The only path remaining is the total collapse of the Islamic Republic and the liberation of the Iranian nation from the twin plagues of Mullahs and Marxists.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖s editorial policy.
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